Use Case: Business Continuity Management

Introduction

Being prepared for uncertainty is no longer optional – a fact unfortunately evident to nearly every business around the world. As the countries around the world recover, a review of their performance and preparedness of Business Continuity Management (BCM), Disaster Recovery (DR) and overall Operational Resilience (OpRes) continues. Many organisations leverage Alyne’s Software as a Service to achieve higher maturity in these domains. Some common challenges and success factors emerge as patterns.

Common Challenges

• Asset Based Focus
  Taking each asset, evaluating business impact, threats and vulnerabilities and defining appropriate continuity measures has been the traditional approach to BCM. This can lead to a missing process or service based top down view on resilience. 
• Theoretical Approach
  BCM, DR and OpRes need to be more than a document. They need to be trained and tested in real life. Keeping to a theoretical approach increases the risk of the prepared concepts being unrealistic. 
• Biased Evaluations
  The method of evaluating business criticality has a huge influence on the level of bias in the rating of individual components. For example, asking a simple question of “how important is this device for the company?” may produce a hugely biased outcome, depending who you ask which has strong follow on effects to all other aspects of the BCM program.

Success Factors

• Resilience of Services
  Focus on the resilience of entire services and define measures and plans from the top down. This actually produces the most effective operational resilience capability. 
• Live Testing
  Involve as many people as possible and assume nothing. While you may think you would all react the same way or take the same mitigation action, only live testing involving as many people as possible reveals the truth. I can guarantee some surprising outcomes from these exercises for you! 
• Resilient by Design
  Make architectural and procurement decisions with resilience in mind. Force continuity of services and resilient operations capabilities to be decision criteria when operating and changing your organisation.